Doctors fear urgent care centers are wildly overusing antibiotics—for profit

Enlarge / Here, have some antibiotics. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Popular urgent care centers may be the biggest-and most overlooked-culprits in the dangerous overuse of antibiotics in clinics, according to a new analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Based on insurance claims from patients with employee-sponsored coverage, researchers estimated that about 46 percent of patients who visited urgent care centers in 2014 for conditions that cannot be treated with antibiotics-such as a common cold that's caused by a virus-left with useless antibiotic prescriptions that target bacterial infections. That rate of inappropriate antibiotic use is almost double the rate the researchers saw in emergency departments (25 percent) and almost triple the rate seen in traditional medical offices (17 percent).

The authors of the analysis-a team of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of Utah, and the Pew Charitable Trusts-concluded that interventions for urgent care centers are "urgently needed."

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